Therapy Method
Somatic therapy that tracks the body's responses to help understand and change patterns that words alone may not reach.
"Oh — that means I'm not crazy. This is just what happens after trauma." — A client, on understanding the body's trauma response
Virtual therapy in California
Developed by Dr. Pat Ogden, PhD, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a body-centered approach that works through two distinct processes — one developmental, one trauma-focused — engaging the nervous system directly, alongside thoughts and emotions, to support lasting change.
Trauma and chronic stress don't live in memory alone. They live in the body and nervous system — as tension, guarding, and reflexes that were once protective, but no longer.
Your body is also an active participant in how you experience the world.
Your stomach tightens. Your breath gets shallow. You slump. Or perhaps your head arrives long before your feet as you walk.
SP works directly with this mind-body connection — creating experiences that help you discover your patterns and, more importantly, begin to change your lived experience.
The work is organized around three phases:
Phase 1: Resourcing — Developing greater resourcefulness and flexibility, and strengthening what's already working.
Phase 2: Trauma Processing — Working with and releasing the body's truncated responses to frightening or overwhelming experiences.
Phase 3: Developmental Processing — Updating beliefs and strategies that developed in childhood and early relationships to feel more secure.
These aren't rigid boxes. Resources continue throughout the work, and we integrate gains as they emerge.
Before moving into processing, we strengthen your ability to notice when your nervous system is becoming activated and to calm yourself back to a more resourced place.
And you don't need to be activated to use these resources. Using them in daily life helps regardless.
A resource might be feeling your bottom supported by your chair, lengthening your spine to feel more calm and confident, orienting to your surroundings, using your breath to calm yourself, or pushing into the ground with your feet.
We create new resources and build on what's working.
SP creates present-moment experiences that invite curiosity about what happens in your body, emotions, thoughts, and movement. We call these experiments.
For instance, I might invite you to slump and then notice what happens.
Then we experiment with the opposite.
Your breath? Thoughts? Emotions? Sense of yourself?
We set up direct experiences so you can learn from your own system how you respond to your world.
After something frightening or overwhelming, your body may continue responding as though the danger is still present — even when you know you're safe now.
With trauma symptoms, you might freeze, go numb, become suddenly overwhelmed or agitated, experience nightmares or emotional or visual flashbacks, or have uncomfortable physical sensations that seem to come out of nowhere.
When processing trauma stored in the body, we start with a sliver of a traumatic memory — just enough for the body to respond with a little activation — and then turn our attention completely toward the body.
We mindfully track what emerges and discover protective responses that wanted to happen during the original event but couldn't — perhaps pushing away, running, turning away, or creating a fist.
I guide this process by repeatedly asking questions that can only be answered through focused awareness, like: Do you feel the sensation more in your hand or your forearm?
As you track your experience, we get curious to see what wants to emerge next. Involuntary responses can start to emerge. These are responses that wanted to happen at the time but couldn't.
We stay with this process through completion, which is often followed by an energetic release and a sense of peacefulness.
Through this process, our aim is for the past traumatic experience to become a memory rather than something you keep reliving — a hallmark of trauma.
We then deepen and integrate what changed — often a new belief and felt sense surfaces: I survived or I'm safe now.
As children, we make sense of our world and adapt to the circumstances we're given.
Our home life and environment may lead us to believe:
I'm not good enough.
I have to get everything right.
Other people's needs matter more than mine.
It's safer not to need anyone.
And around those beliefs, strategies develop.
We might become perfectionistic and driven, extraordinarily self-reliant, highly attuned to other people's moods, or learn to withdraw and make ourselves small.
These weren't character flaws.
They were very smart adaptations.
Repeated over time, these beliefs and strategies get baked into our nervous system, almost like the inner rings of a tree. They're deeply embedded.
The body doesn't just reflect the old pattern. It participates in setting thoughts and behaviors in motion.
Developmental processing often begins with something currently bothering you.
Maybe your boss gave you a strange look. Your stomach tightened. You got fearful. Your inner critic kicked up to an eleven. You immediately set about trying to make things right — even though nothing is actually wrong.
Developmental processing starts by slowing down to study how the experience affects you in the present moment — in your body, emotions, thoughts, and images.
This can lead to a key memory that created a distorted belief and a strategy you now labor under, so you could feel more secure.
The present experience may funnel into an earlier memory of your father's look of deep disappointment when you got a B+ instead of an A+.
We then process this memory and discover an old belief that, under the light of day, you can see is not true. We update the belief, provide a missing experience, and integrate what's new.
For example, if the new belief is I've always been good enough, regardless of how I perform, we anchor that belief to help your system register the change. We do so by noticing how it feels in your body, emotions, thoughts, posture, and sense of yourself.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy grew partly from the work of Ron Kurtz, creator of Hakomi, with whom Pat Ogden studied and worked.
At its heart, this work facilitates curiosity, mindfulness, and relational alchemy, while allowing space to see what wants to happen rather than knowing beforehand or trying to figure out a solution. We trust that your system will naturally move toward healing and wholeness.
My role is as a facilitator, and we are collaborators in your healing process.
Outside of sessions, you'll note what is working — and what isn't — in daily life.
We celebrate gains made and discover what else is calling for our attention and healing in the next session.
SP can be quite helpful when you have an intellectual understanding, but the same patterns keep showing up despite your best efforts — depriving you of the well-being you richly deserve.
You might recognize:
As old patterns loosen, new beliefs and behaviors take root. You may feel more whole and empowered to make more supportive life choices.
You may also have an easier time:
Updating old patterns is possible when you also involve the body.
If this approach speaks to you, reach out. Let's explore whether Sensorimotor Psychotherapy might be a good fit for you.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy · Developed by Pat Ogden, PhD · Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute
Questions
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a somatic, mindfulness-based approach that uses focused awareness of the mind-body connection to support healing from trauma symptoms and limiting patterns.
It can support panic, anxiety, emotional overwhelm, inner criticism, distrust of self or others, and protective responses that live in the nervous system.
No. The work is paced gently, and part of therapy can be learning how to notice sensation and protective responses without becoming overwhelmed.